


Slip of the Tongue

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [251]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Accidental declaration of love, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Friends Giving Friends Shit, M/M, Pining, Post-Break Up, Smoking, Teasing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-11
Packaged: 2020-01-11 17:09:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18428444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: Steve says something he shouldn't to someone he's only just met.





	Slip of the Tongue

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: You’re the super hot server at a restaurant who said ‘enjoy your meal’ and I accidentally replied ‘I love you too’ and now I can’t look at you. Prompt from this [generator](http://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator).

“I’m sorry?” the guy says, pretending, god bless him. His ears are pink and his cheeks are too and there’s no way he didn’t catch every syllable verbatim, is there? Steve thinks in a panic. Crap. Crap crap crap.

Doesn’t help that Tony’s wheezing with laughter, or that Nat just shot Barcardi out of her nose. And Sam’s gleeful, sunny grin might as well have _you’re never living this down, Rogers_ written on it in neon.

“Sorry,” Steve echoes, pink answering pink. “I meant, uh, thanks.”

Their server-- _Bucky_ , if his nametag’s to be believed--bobs his head, dark waves brushing his collar and those blue, blue eyes somehow brave enough (kind enough?) to meet Steve’s. “Sure. Let me know if you need anything else.”

“Oh, Steve needs something, all right,” Tony spit out before Bucky’s more than three steps away.

“Tony!”

“Yeah, Tony,” Nat chides, making a beeline for the cheese fries. “He’s gonna need it more than once, by the looks of him. How long's it been since you had any, sailor?”

Steve’s face flips full-on beet red.

“Aw,” Sam says, throwing an arm around Steve’s shoulders. “Cut the guy some slack, ok? It’s not his fault he lives like a monk. Oh, wait. Yes, it is.”

Then they’re giggling like monkeys, the three of them, his best friends in the world who are apparently bent on humiliating him in public--no more, Steve thinks morosely, than he already did.

“If it make you feel any better, Rogers,” Tony says in his three drinks-in drawl, “he is pretty. I’d fuck him.”

Steve reaches for his (first) beer and shrugs off Sam’s arm. “Nope. Not helping.”

“Yeah,” Nat says. “You’re not exactly discerning, Stark.”

Sam laughs. “She means that you’re a slut.”

Tony shrugs, beaming at Steve across the nachos. “If by _slut_ you mean a very sexually satisfied person open to new experiences with all manners of interesting people, Natasha, then count me guilty as charged. Not all of us find the love of our tragically monogamous lives in college and exchange rings and house keys the moment we kiss.”

“I’ll tell Wanda you said hi.”

“Please do,” Tony says magnanimously. “Lovely lady, your wife. Kind of her to let you off the leash for one night. So yes, please give her my best. If she’ll allow you to speak my name in her presence, that is.”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “Can we set aside your hate-crush on my wife for ten seconds and get back to the business at hand?”

“Which is?”

A big, wicked grin. “Reminding Steve that he just proposed to our waiter.”

“I did _not_!” Steve says, way too loud, which only sent his friends further into hysterics. “God, it was a slip of the tongue.”

“Oh,” Sam snorts, “yeah, you wish it was.”

Tony nearly spits up the last of his Mai Tai. “He wishes it was a slip of the dick, more like.”

“I hate all of you,” Steve says, which is sort of true, but what’s more true is that he kinda hates his damn self. “Each and every one of you. So much.”

“Do we need more drinks?” Nat says, shaking the rocks in her glass.

“Oh, we so do,” Sam says. “All these fuckers are empty. Hey, Steve. Get your sweet baboo over here, huh?”

“I’m just”--Steve’s on his feet, pushing away from the table, embarrassment peeling over him in waves--“I’m gonna, um--”

And then he turns tail like a scared hare and runs.

 

****

 

The bathroom is mercifully empty. The mirror’s shaking from the speakers on the other side--something raucous with a serious twang--and the sink could do with a scrub, but there’s nobody in there to needle him except his reflection. The room smells like cigarettes and there’s ash on the floor and hell yes, that’s exactly what he wants.

He lights up and takes a long, greedy drag. The tobacco cuts through the beer nicely and he draws again, holds it, blows it out with a steadier breath. Put the last 20 minutes in clearer perspective.

So he declared his love for some random (albeit painfully gorgeous) guy. So what? No, it wasn’t his finest hour, but something tells him a man that pretty has heard a lot worse. Which doesn’t make it ok, what he said, but it probably won’t make the guy’s _guess what some drunken douchebag said to me_ top ten.

Not that Steve’s drunk. He’s not drunk. He’s just--he waves the cig around, watches the smoke swim around him in the mirror--he’s just fucking lonely, that’s all.

 _Picky_ , Tony would call it, the word coated in nine different levels of disdain. _Overly dependent on conventional concepts of_   _romance_ , Nat would say, if she weren’t up to her eyeballs in rum. _Afraid_ , Sam would say if they were alone in their office, chatting comfortably over their monitors. _You’re just afraid of getting hurt again. Which I get, Steve, believe me. But you can’t keep living in the past. It’s been two years, man. You gotta let that shit go_.

He bites hard into the filter, feels his teeth catch his bottom lip. Yeah, he thinks, intellectually, I know that. But emotionally? Easier said than done.

It’s been long enough now that he doesn’t see Thor all over the apartment, that the space doesn’t feel like it’s haunted anymore by half-developed images of the good times, the ugly, and the bad. He’s gotten rid of a lot of their furniture, swapped it out for new pieces one by one, as his paycheck allowed, and that’s helped a lot. He doesn’t walk on the rug that Thor brought back from Turkey or sit in the chair Thor’s mother picked out. He doesn’t sit every night on the couch that Thor liked to fuck on, liked to spread Steve over his lap and open him up and then pull him flush so that Steve’s cock was trapped between them, Thor’s fingers wrapped around his wrists, his wrists shoved against the small of his back, and Thor rolling his hips slowly, slowly, until Steve’s head fell back and his dick was so hard that it hurt and he _begged_.

Thor hadn’t wanted to take any of it with him into his new life, and why would he? Steve stubs out his dead cig and lights up another. Thor’s new boyfriend--god, no, he reminds himself, his _husband_ , natch--has a hell of a place by the lakeside, a penthouse. Can see all the way to the UP on a good day, probably.

He’s only seen them in the city once, Thor and Loki, across a crowded street on the Mile. They’d been getting out of a limo in front of some top-shelf hotel and the way Loki had curled his arm through Thor’s, the way that Thor had looked down at him, a hot smile that was somehow full of loving--well. Steve might have ditched his Tinder date and bolted for Tony’s and his ever-ready liquor cabinet instead. No more attempts at a date after that.

His friends thought he was pathetic. Well, Nat did. And at least she’d say so to his face. Sam took more of the sympathy line, to a point, but even he, Steve suspected, was getting tired of Steve’s Eeyore shit. And Tony? He laughs to himself, watches the mirror him chuckle, too. Tony had made his preference known more than once, and as fun as that might be, Steve didn’t want to go there:

“I can’t,” he’d said the last time Tony had made a play for him. “I need you as a friend too much.”

Tony had smiled, a low, simmering smile that didn’t quite hide his hurt. “Of course you do,” he’d said, taking a small, enormous step back. “You’d be a mess without my stellar guidance. You’d still be in the closet, practically.”

He'd fought the urge to reach out, to squeeze Tony's arm. But he knew that would've made it worse. Instead, he'd said: “I was out for ten years before we met, Tone.”

Tony had shaken his head. “Ah, ah. We’ve had this discussion before, Steven. There’s out and then there’s, you know, _out_.”

Steve sighs and watches the last of the embers burn. Where the hell is he now, two years after getting dumped on his ass for a skinny rich son-of-a-bitch? Declaring his love for random servers and smoking illegally in a bar bathroom. Yeah, he’s really on the goddamn up and up.

He sees the door swing before he hears it, swings around in a flustered, smokey rush.

“Hey,” somebody says, gruff. “No smoking inside, man. You wanna light up, go around the back.”

Then Steve sees the somebody and the somebody sees him and goddamnit, his face goes right back to lit match.

“Oh, hey,” Bucky says, looking as suddenly flustered as Steve feels. “It’s you.”


End file.
